Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:00strange overtones and connotations,
00:00:03an authoritative businessman, and so
00:00:06on, but Ghassan has really been involved in antiquity for many
00:00:09decades, and he wrote a very
00:00:13interesting column about Odysseus. Well,
00:00:16I'm just maybe because of this,
00:00:20referring to this column on RFI, Radio
00:00:23Franceis International, how
00:00:26truly can Helen be black
00:00:30or white, why is it so, why did black
00:00:33Helen captivate our compatriots so much?
00:00:37In fact, different people for different reasons
00:00:40might have been captivated by it. I want to make a small correction
00:00:44to Jan Levchenko's words,
00:00:48the thing is that I quoted
00:00:52a poem, an inscription, a Pompeian
00:00:55inscription from Latin, translated by
00:00:58Fyodor Alexandrovich Petrovsky.
00:03:00fallen victim to her son, that
00:03:02she, uh, her role is played by the same
00:03:05actress, they were hooked on Helen because
00:03:09how can this beautiful,
00:03:12beautiful,
00:03:14Helen be, be black,
00:03:17so there's a moment here, that is, people simply couldn't
00:03:21restrain themselves and in some way displayed their residual racism
00:03:24in this way, in the film, the
00:03:28skin color of the heroines
00:03:31has only an aesthetic
00:03:35function, a way, so to speak,
00:03:38to separate them, including from Penelope, because Penelope is such,
00:03:42as it were, the embodiment
00:03:46of virtues, in
00:03:49relation to Helen and Clytemnestra, it all looks
00:03:52different, they are a bit, they are a bit
00:04:30Well, there is such a truly amazing moment here, it
00:04:34is connected with the fact, as it seems to me, this is only
00:04:38a hypothesis, it is connected with the fact that for
00:04:41many people, well, even for myself,
00:04:45yes,
00:04:47what is happening
00:04:49in the so-called political reality is so
00:04:53phantasmagorical, so unbelievable,
00:04:56implausible, and I just don't want to be in this world.
00:05:01In this world, where, yes, Russia attacked Ukraine,
00:05:04is waging an extermination war, insane,
00:05:07absolutely,
00:05:10in this world happening.
00:05:42adaptation, a new adaptation of Odysseus, they attacked
00:05:46it as something authentic,
00:05:49they argue about it as something authentic,
00:05:52that is, from the point of
00:05:56view of history, cultural theory, it is a wonderful, amazing
00:05:59event, and it can
00:06:02be compared, with what else,
00:06:05about this Roman Ingarden
00:06:08once wrote, an aesthetician, philosopher, student.
00:06:12He spoke about a surprising circumstance:
00:06:16Renaissance
00:06:19artists, whom Jan Levchenko mentioned in
00:06:22the comment, painted, as is known, wonderful
00:06:26portraits, and the ordinary
00:06:29viewer, looking at these portraits, thinks to himself, they
00:06:32are incredibly similar to
00:06:36the original, none of us have seen the originals, these people
00:06:39have long since decayed, so to speak, their bones have decayed. But
00:06:43the portrait looks incredibly
00:06:45authentic, this
00:06:49property
00:06:51of human consciousness, especially, apparently, in such crisis historical
00:06:55moments, something that
00:06:59once in childhood or once in youth at
00:07:02school sank into
00:07:05the soul, remained in memory,
00:07:07is perceived as genuinely
00:07:09real,
00:07:11while the reality... in which this person feels
00:07:15like a loser or is simply dissatisfied
00:07:18with this reality, this reality seems to him a fiction,
00:07:21an illusion, this circumstance, it
00:07:25seems to me,
00:07:28determines such mass interest, the desire
00:07:31to watch it, and I am speaking, of course, not about
00:07:34people directly involved in
00:07:37the tragedy that is happening now in
00:07:41about people who... are still
00:07:43one step, somehow two
00:07:46steps, two borders removed from it,
00:07:50are, as it were, near, but not quite
00:07:53near, I am now in Germany, you are in
00:07:57the Czech Republic and we
00:08:01simply have the privilege to reflect,
00:08:04to reason, to go to the cinema,
00:08:07a privilege that our friends, acquaintances
00:08:11might not have. Here
00:08:15it's very interesting, the presence of war, it is in our lives in this
00:08:19film, I'm interested in discussing such a
00:08:22reinterpretation of war, just now, from your point
00:08:26of view, yes, as a specialist in antiquity, in epic, in
00:08:29myth, this modern reading,
00:08:32yes, for the ancients,
00:08:35war was not a moral problem as
00:08:39such, it was a natural state, yes, it was...
00:09:01as evil, certainly, but the main thing,
00:09:03this is clearly presented in the myth of Odysseus,
00:09:07the thing is that
00:09:09Odysseus is helped by...
00:09:13Athena, despite the fact that she knows he is
00:09:16cunning, he often
00:09:18deceives,
00:09:21because in fact his real father was Sisyphus, this is also
00:09:25a separate story, very
00:09:27interesting, but
00:09:29Odysseus doesn't
00:09:32often,
00:09:34in general, sin, not giving
00:09:37burial to his warriors,
00:09:40violating what...
00:10:12the gods turn away from man, that is, even living
00:10:16by the laws of war, killing your
00:10:19enemy, you must observe some
00:10:23rules, this is one.
00:10:55to man, such an aestheticization of war
00:10:58is present, of course, but it is present not only in
00:11:01antiquity, war is evil,
00:11:04an inevitable evil that accompanies
00:11:07man, and the only
00:11:10demand of such a moral nature that
00:11:14both Homer and
00:11:17the tragedians put forward,
00:11:20is to observe
00:11:22some rules, this
00:11:26is, for example, the need to allow
00:11:29the burial of a hero, yes, these are the rights
00:11:33of the dead, yes, the dead are endowed with rights, they
00:11:37are endowed with a certain dignity,
00:11:39and depriving them of this dignity is not allowed, so
00:11:43in this sense,
00:11:46antiquity
00:11:50is not so brutal
00:11:52as one might think. Well?
00:12:48about politics, about the political science of the Odyssey,
00:12:51because among other things, it, as I see it, is
00:12:55a story about the origin of power, a story about the origin of
00:12:58the state, yes, it's a story about
00:13:02a certain assertion of sovereignty, yes, sovereign
00:13:05right, the return of Odysseus to Ithaca,
00:13:08the restoration
00:13:10of his power, traditional power, including the refutation of Zeus's
00:13:14law, from this point of view we can read
00:13:17the Odyssey as
00:13:20a political statement, as a statement about the origin of
00:13:39the founder of sociology, has several interesting passages about
00:13:43how, strictly speaking, the re-establishment
00:13:46of social order always happens when young men return
00:13:50from war or a campaign, right? That is, some
00:13:53kind of. Uh, well, terminologically,
00:13:57a small social group emerges, literally 10 people,
00:14:0015 people, right? They develop a very strong
00:14:03social bond with each other, then they
00:14:06fall out of the social order, that is, they go to raid someone or to fight
00:14:10with someone, so to speak, either on a raid or to repel a raid,
00:14:13and after that they return and
00:14:16become, as it were, a very large, incorrect, and
00:14:20well-noticed part of the correct whole, and
00:14:24Weber generally... concludes that such things, both
00:14:27Athenian democracy and German fellowships,
00:14:30rooted in what can be called дружины (armed retinue) in Russian,
00:14:34yes, yes, all of this is, strictly speaking, associations of veterans, yes, all
00:14:38these are those very small male groups, small male
00:14:41collectives, which rallied, lost someone,
00:14:44returned and did not accept the social order they
00:14:48had before they were ripped out, as it were, of this social order,
00:14:51they began to change it.
00:15:0711th, yes, so there are two big wars,
00:15:11indeed many veterans, there are over a million
00:15:14people, and this is well reflected in mass
00:15:17culture, and mass culture in this regard provides
00:15:21a fork, it says either...
00:15:37cannot live, they are unrehabilitatable,
00:15:40yes, well, for example, in American cinema, about
00:15:43the Vietnam War, strictly speaking, they usually said so,
00:15:47and the change, the significant change, that happened, which, by the way, the Odyssey
00:15:51reflects very well, Nolan's Odyssey, is connected with the fact
00:15:55that there is no order at home,
00:15:57returning from war, being infected, yes, with this
00:16:00virus, that you must perceive
00:16:04the person with whom you were connected by the situation as an enemy.
00:16:07You actually have to kill him, yes, what Homer
00:16:11, so to speak, says that Homer, in fact,
00:16:14describes this situation of agon, it turns out that this agon,
00:16:17strictly speaking, exists in the social order exactly the same way, yes, that is, it is at home,
00:16:21you can't, you can't
00:16:51if he wants to get this social order, then yes, Sergey, absolutely
00:16:55right, he must establish this social order anew,
00:16:58yes, he must, as it were, society, having returned from the war, establish it as
00:17:02if from himself, and he must do this through
00:17:55movies, well, actually, the whole Stone universe, the key
00:17:59hero there is actually a veteran returned from the war, Casey Dutton, yes, that
00:18:03is, the son of the hero Kevin Costner. The second branch
00:18:06says that no, dude, no,
00:18:09even if you thought there was some order at home, when you return from
00:18:13the war, you'll realize that there isn't really any there, there's the same
00:18:16violence, yes, and if you want to achieve this order, you must
00:18:19establish it, this is very interesting, then, then it's actually
00:18:23a conversation about war, yes, then it's a conversation about how war
00:18:27is a generative form, that is, it's not just,
00:18:30it's as if, being a destructive form, because war is the antithesis of social order, that is,
00:18:34where there is war, there is no. the orgy of violence, which
00:18:55ends, yes, it would seem, a fairy-tale journey, the hero overcomes trials, yes, at the end peace should reign, yes, he
00:18:58comes home, returns to Ithaca, he returns to
00:19:02establish this orgy of violence, yes, and...
00:19:05the killing of all the guests,
00:20:07yes, the slaughter, the slaughter, the slaughter at the feast, that's
00:20:11where this is amazing, how this
00:20:15chain of violence goes through this film, and maybe
00:20:19that's why it also leaves such a very heavy, powerful
00:20:22impression, in fact, his son becomes
00:20:25a man only at that moment, not when he
00:20:28tries to string his father's bow, not when he goes to look for his father, yes,
00:20:32when he talks to Menelaus and so on with the disfigured, apparently,
00:20:36by Menelaus, Helen, no, his son
00:20:39becomes a man only when he kills one of the suitors and throws a spear to his
00:20:43father, if you actually watch this scene, then
00:20:47in this scene we see that...
00:20:50the threshold that the boy could not cross throughout
00:20:54the entire picture, he crosses only at the very end, when he takes
00:20:57a life, I wanted to ask two things, so to speak, naturally from your reasoning,
00:21:01two questions, the first one that I didn't even expect, but which
00:21:05arose during this broadcast, because Anton Dolin also said that
00:21:09someone wrote a comment that Odysseus is a hero of the SVO, a veteran of the SVO
00:21:13returned, and what do
00:21:15you think, veterans of the SVO or generally this
00:21:18post-war?
00:22:24For example, in this social
00:22:28order, it was not customary to kill representatives of the elite, they could not kill each other, this was a very important move,
00:22:31such a, uh, move, which, well, that is,
00:22:35only how to find these endless positions, yes, there
00:22:38for Shelepin, for Semichastny, what Brezhnev
00:22:41did, yes, to
00:22:44remove someone from power, to put them in charge of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, or the Union
00:22:47of Writers, the Union of Philatelists. Uh,
00:22:50this is, of course, this is, of course, a veteran's story, yes, that is, it's the story
00:22:53of people who went through the war, who decided that they shouldn't kill each other
00:22:57anymore,
00:22:59not to repress the family, also of the exiled
00:23:02new children, not to touch the wife, not to touch the children, yes, that is,
00:23:06this is, this is important, but at the same time there were other things, for example,
00:23:09related to public consensus regarding the fact that
00:23:12disabled people should not exist in peaceful
00:23:16life, yes, that is, all these 101 km from...
00:23:20let's get rid of beggars, yes, there and so on and so on and so on, that
00:23:23is, here your favorite plot about biopolitics, it also plays
00:23:27yes social hygiene, yes, one thing is the survivors who are
00:23:30whole, and another thing is the survivors who are
00:23:33crippled, so the survivors who are whole, establishing a new
00:23:37social order, they prefer to forget about the crippled survivors,
00:23:40they prefer not to see them, yes, they would like them
00:23:43to simply drink somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, beyond the
00:23:47hundred-kilometer zone, slowly. connection in a small
00:24:50group, yes, the only true, yes, the only
00:24:53order that a person on the front line has, is relationships with people from their unit,
00:24:56yes, their squad, that's what Soviet cinema
00:25:00showed, that strictly speaking, no, it doesn't work at all, yes, large structures
00:25:03win, you won't be able to build
00:25:06a brave new world after the war, in which, for example, your
00:25:09honest relationship with each other, with those you fought with, will
00:25:13become the core of any social relationship,
00:25:16yes, it doesn't work. But
00:25:21of course, I would say that such
00:25:24a deep scar on any social order, such a number
00:25:27of foreign bodies, and you see, Nolan shows us
00:25:31one simple thing, he says: the guy who returned from the war is a foreign
00:25:35body, no matter what's happening at home, chaos or
00:25:38order, he's still a foreign body, he can
00:25:42cause a slaughter
00:25:44in order, yes, this very large number of foreign
00:25:48bodies, it generally has...
00:26:02foreign bodies, or rather, these foreign bodies, having gone
00:26:06through the war, and we are talking, I think, about millions of people, eventually
00:26:09already now, it's hundreds of thousands in any case, it will already be much more than
00:26:13a million people, and they will need to somehow find,
00:26:16after all, peaceful life in some form, one would like to think,
00:26:19will come, and they will need to find their place in the new social
00:26:23order, and apparently this will become one of the main plots, yes, this
00:26:26return of Odysseus, I would say that this is a very big
00:26:29Afghan, we remember the Afghans with you. The beginning and middle
00:26:33of the nineties, we understand that these were people who
00:26:37traded their veteran status for the opportunity to trade
00:26:40alcohol, tobacco, protect someone and so on
00:26:44and so on, I think that but at the same time, we must understand that they played a big
00:26:48role in the formation of business in
00:26:51the early nineties, yes, in the destruction of old party
00:26:54structures, some Komsomol ones, yes, there
00:26:57they played a role, I would say that
00:27:00if they asked me to make... a forecast, putting on one
00:27:03side the so-called SVO, on
00:27:07the other Nolan's Odyssey, not Homer's, I can't say anything about Homer, I'm not
00:27:11sure if one can even talk about Homer, it's a difficult question, yes, I would say, guys, well,
00:27:14as it were, of course, if of course, that is, on one hand, these
00:27:18people will first increase chaos, and then they will try
00:27:21to build some order, that is, first a slaughter, and then
00:28:02laid for home, it was laid in vain, just like
00:28:05that pile of corpses that was laid for Agamemnon's ambitions
00:28:09in Troy, yes, that is, you understand, so maybe Nolan wants
00:28:12to say this, yes, what does he want to say, guys, it doesn't matter, yes, that is, you
00:28:16laid a pile of corpses there,
00:28:20fled, you laid a pile of corpses here, fled, well, with your wife, yes, that is,
00:28:23profit, you sort of fled with your family and son, yes, but the meaning is the same,
00:28:27you lay a pile of corpses, you need